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Duke Energy employees continue working to bury utility lines on Camperdown Way on Monday, October 07, 2013. / Heidi Heilbrunn/Staff

Duke Energy workers feed cables underground as a part of a $1.2 million project to buy overhead lines on commercial corridors. / Heidi Heilbrunn / Staff

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The event that precipitated this is nearly always referred to as The Ice Storm.

Almost eight years later, Augusta Road business owners and residents can still recall the exact number of days they went without power that December in 2005. Tales abound of downed trees and homes ruined and people pitched into cold and darkness.

Of the effort to put power lines underground in areas hardest hit by the storm, they’re less clear.

Greenville’s utility burial program has evolved since the first conversations were held about what to do with the more than 400 miles of wires Duke Energy manages. Early calls that targeted whole neighborhoods turned into a focus on commercial corridors, with Haywood Road chosen as the pilot project because some service lines there were already buried.

But even a mile-long stretch proved too costly for the cash on hand. The program was scaled down again to key intersections, which means poles still proliferate in areas originally set as priority projects, including outage-prone Augusta Road. While a segment from Oregon Street to East Augusta Place is slated for burial, some area residents believe the sense of urgency has faded.

City officials say they’re as committed to burying power lines as ever, though progress seems incremental, funding is limited and the projects are time-consuming and complex. With those challenges, certain corridors and neighborhoods may not be good candidates.

“Given the sheer volume of above-ground utilities, we’re not going to get them all buried in the next 10 years,” said Councilman David Sudduth, who represents the Augusta Road area.

Changing tempo

Pole by pole, overhead wires gradually disappeared this week as new ones were fed underground on Camperdown Way.

It’s the second project done in partnership with Duke Energy since the utility burial program began using money supplied from fees customers pay and a slice of Duke’s revenues. About $1.5 million is generated annually.

The city now has $2.7 million in the burial fund to tackle the next wave of conversions that will continue on Haywood Road from Toys ‘R’ Us to Kanpai of Tokyo.

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When the cost to move lines underground ranges anywhere from $1,200 to $1,500 a linear foot, projects are chosen with care, usually on small stretches where property owners want the work done, where investment is already happening and where the cost and complexity make the most economic sense, said city engineer Dwayne Cooper.

Criteria were different in earlier years, when a committee drew up a list of potential corridors based on property values and number of outages. Under that, Augusta ranked worst in electric reliability, followed by Haywood Road and Pleasantburg Drive.

Then came lessons learned with the pilot on Haywood. It took months to come up with a design that worked around existing utilities, traffic concerns and the approval needed from owners to dig a trench in private rights-of-way, Cooper said.

With the current system, the city is also targeting West Washington Street and plans to relocate 20 to 23 utility poles to the back of businesses from Mulberry to Trescott streets.

The wires would stay overhead, but the move would help with visibility and eliminate unsightly lines that sag over sidewalks close to the road.

A similar project on Augusta between Lupo and Capers streets, where cars sometimes veer into utility poles, yielded a “drastic change,” with a calmer, more attractive looking strip of road, Cooper said.

With so many power lines in the city, and 36 percent of them underground, it makes sense to relocate utilities to the back of businesses for the cost savings involved, officials said. Take the relocation on Augusta Street, which cost less than $200,000, and covered roughly the same distance as the stretch of wires to be buried a few blocks down for $2.4 million.

“You can try to knock out a little bit more and it not break the bank,” Sudduth said.

Even so, the lines are still above ground, laid bare to any storm that comes their way, said to Kelly Odom, president of the Augusta Road Business Association.

Odom, who owns Pickwick Pharmacy, can count on at least three outages a year, which means a total loss of business until power is restored.

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“We’re dead in the water, so that definitely hurts us economically,” he said. “It’s not just a safety issue or an aesthetics issue, it’s a business issue for us.”

Odom mentioned his visits to the Myers Park neighborhood in Charlotte and how more up to date it looks without those lines in the sky.

“People haven’t forgotten about it, but I definitely don’t think it was on the forefront like it was a year or two years ago,” he said.

On the home front

While commercial burials have somewhat moved away from the focus to upgrade electric reliability, Sudduth said the city is making a more noticeable dent with its residential efforts.

The city has $310,000 a year to spend on the program, or 20 percent of the utility fund. Homeowners are given up to a $1,500 subsidy to bury power lines from pole to house — those individual wires that take the longest to fix during widespread outages.

Underground lines are also vulnerable to water damage and can take longer to fix, according to a recent study from the Edison Electric Institute, a consortium of electric companies.

Cooper said there have been attempts to bury lines in specific Greenville neighborhoods, though response has been scattered, and no one street has gone completely underground.

“It’s all about the homeowner’s participation,” Cooper said. “If the cost to bury their service was $100 over the subsidy, and they don’t want to do it, then we can’t force them.”

As of the end of last month, 2,507 residential applications had been received, with officials aiming at 168 conversions a year, city documents show.

Based on those numbers, Greenville “has the most active program” out of the cities Duke has partnered with, said Duke spokesman Ryan Mosier.

Meanwhile, the hunt to find more money to pay for conversion has come up empty.

Sudduth originally had hoped to sell bonds to fund a large-scale effort and pay the bonds off using Duke’s utility fund contribution. That turned out to be illegal.

“You’ve got to find another funding source, and there’s not any appetite to increase the franchise fee (from 4 percent to 5 percent) because all that does is pass an additional fee onto Duke customers,” he said.

The other option is to find general fund revenues the city could invest, which is hard to do with budgets lately.